“More
than 100,000 female soldiers who have served in the wars are mothers, nearly
half the number of women who have been deployed,” the Times now notes.
“The vast majority are primary caregivers, and a third are single mothers.”

The military
has adapted to women at war by providing contraceptives, ultrasounds,
gynecological exams, and, for married couples, trailers. “Motherhood, though,
poses a more formidable challenge for the armed forces.” Of course it does: the
military has to convince mothers that something else is more important than
their children.

“[M]others,
whether married or single, say that long periods of time away from their
children and then the transition back to domestic life — where they are
expected to immediately resume household responsibilities — can be
excruciatingly difficult.” Is this a surprise? And, of course, not all women
have opportunity to transition back to domestic life. “At least 25 women with
children have died” in Iraq or Afghanistan.

What trumps a
mother’s responsibility and privilege to raise her children?

Staff Sgt.
Connica McFadden of the Army received only two weeks’ notice that she would be
deploying and scrambled to find a caretaker for her 6-month-old daughter and
6-year-old son. … Heartbroken, she weaned the baby abruptly and left her with
an aunt, while her son stayed elsewhere with his grandmother.

Not obeying
orders was not an option. Sergeant McFadden, who holds only an associate’s
degree, wanted to hold on to her career. ‘It matters what I do,’ Sergeant
McFadden said. ‘I love helping people. It’s for our country. My dad was a
Vietnam vet. I feel like I owe it to him.’

Why did McFadden ignore her heartbreak? Because she
owed it to her dad to leave her infant daughter? Because “helping people” is
more important than helping her own children? Patriotism means abandoning your
children to others? Career trumps kids?

When
Willa Townes, a single mother in the Army Reserve, was called to Iraq early in
the war, her sister agreed to watch her 5-year-old son — then backed out two
weeks before Ms. Townes was to deploy. ‘I broke down right there,’ Ms. Townes
said. ‘I was devastated.’

Refusing
deployment was not an option, she said. She was then the No. 3 person in the
chain of command, and it was her 15th year in the military. She needed five
more years to retire with a hefty bonus. ‘I wanted to go,’ said Ms. Townes, who
retired last year as a lieutenant colonel. ‘I needed to go.’

Frantic,
she turned to her son’s first day care provider, who had become a friend and
volunteered to take him for the year Ms. Townes was away. ‘We were not related
at all,’ Ms. Townes recalled, adding that the arrangement worked wonderfully
and that she insisted on sending her friend money for expenses. ‘We were not
even of the same race. That didn’t matter. People come together to help you
when you are in need.’

Why was Townes so devastated
that her sister backed out? After all, Townes owed a greater responsibility to
her son than did his aunt. Why was fulfilling her responsibility to her son “not
an option”? Townes “wanted to go,” instead of staying to raise her son. Why did
she abandon her son to a day care provider? So she could “retire with a hefty
bonus”? The idea that people help each other when they are in need seemingly
doesn’t apply to her serving her son’s needs.

What’s the
military’s position on this? Perhaps unsurprisingly, whatever serves its
mission seems to be its mantra. “Hanging on to today’s war-savvy, battle-tested
cadre of mothers — and would-be mothers — is both crucial and difficult for the
Army, say officers, enlistees and experts.”

The most
efficacious approach for the military, apparently, would be to raise the
children itself, allowing mothers to focus on war. “Some fixes, though, are
relatively straightforward. ‘The one thing the military could do that would
have a lasting and immediate impact would be to provide plentiful
round-the-clock child care,’ said Lory Manning, who directs the military
women’s project for the Women’s Research and Education Institute, a nonprofit group.”
Plentiful round-the-clock childcare? Rousseau would be pleased. Perhaps these
military orphanages could help prepare the children for future wars by
including mandatory drill.

Women warriors
cannot avoid the inherent conflict between militarism and maternity.
“Technology has helped soften the separation for many parents. Webcams and
Skype have allowed them to talk to their children over dinner or before school.
They leave teddy bears behind with recorded messages or record themselves
reading books that their children love.” But it’s not just about softening the
separation for parents: it’s about the kids. And technology is no replacement
for mommy; a recorded message from a mother killed in Iraq is slight solace for
her child.

Military
mothers still “fret most about the consequences that long deployments will have
on their children.” And well they should. “Recent surveys indicate that most
children, while largely resilient, experience worry and anxiety when a parent
deploys, and the military has tried to address this by increasing counseling
services. Nevertheless, grades and behavior suffer. Young children cry more.
Some start wetting their beds. Nightmares are common, and teenagers can become
more reclusive and defiant.”

Mothers know
this implicitly, yet our society values motherhood so slightly in comparison to
job, career, and militarism that even those who explicitly recognize it remain
conflicted, hesitant to abandon their military careers.

Maj. Katherine
P. Guttormsen, who has a year-old son, dreads the moment she gets the call to
go back to Iraq or Afghanistan …. The thought keeps her up at night, she said.

As a mother in
the military, ‘the sacrifice is greater now,’ said Major Guttormsen, a graduate
of West Point who served in Iraq as company commander of an engineering unit
then switched to public affairs when she decided to have a child. ‘This is a
different Army than I entered into in 1996. It was fun. You were doing
exercises. You weren’t going to Iraq and getting shot at.’

Major
Guttormsen, who was a ‘lioness,’ part of the first team of Army women to search
Iraqi women in Ramadi in 2004, said, ‘I don’t know if I get that call, if I
would be able to do it, and that would be the end of my Army career.’

Women have
something better and more important to do than go off to war: bear and raise
children. Our country's laws should recognize that. This view, though, is
unpopular today as it also argues against women in the workforce, daycare,
contraception, extramarital sex, abortion, and permissive divorce laws, all of
which are now ingrained as parts of the American way of life.

In that sense,
the military mirrors the attitudes of civilian society. When the Times
ran its installment on the conflict felt by military mothers, the Washington
Post ran a piece by a women reporter on latchkey kids, middle schoolers
left on their own after school, that played off her own experience.

The Post reporter,
Brigid Schulte, was “angry” she had had trouble “figur[ing] out what to do with
an 11-year-old after school.” Her gripe: “The structure of work and school have
yet to catch up with the realities of modern American life.” In other words, no
else will care for her son while she’s at work. Her solution? Let him shift for
himself: he “is perfectly happy having some time alone for now.” She promises
she’ll “try” to work from home more and “cobble something together” for him,
which lets her sanctimoniously bemoan the fact that “plenty of his classmates
will just go home alone,” ignoring that that is exactly what her eleven year
old does now.

Unless we
reinstitute respect for motherhood, the most noble human calling, women will
continue to search futilely for something else to fulfill them, and their
children will continue to suffer, left alone or in day care. Mothers will
continue to fight Iraqis, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Afghans, terrorists, Iranians,
or whomever else our government designates as the enemy du jour while
their children are left to fend for themselves.

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